Dow Transportation closed at 11532.56 with a spinning top doji candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 216.07. Intermediate Cycle is positive with rising slope. Short term cycle is positive with rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
Dow Industrial closed at 26743.50 with a bullish marubozu candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 738.81. Intermediate Cycle is positive and rising slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
Russell 2000 closed at 1712.3158 with a bearish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 23.867. Intermediate Cycle is positive and falling. Short term cycle is positive and falling. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
Nasdaq 100 closed at 7531.072 with a doji candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 176.07. Intermediate Cycle is positive and rising. Short term cycle is positive and falling. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
S&P 500 closed at 2929.67 with a bullish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 54.75. Intermediate Cycle is positive and rising slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
WTI Crude oil futures (CL) closed at $70.71 per barrel with a bullish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 3.51. Intermediate Cycle is positive and falling slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Neutral.
Gold futures (GC) closed at 1203.3 with a spinning top doji candle below its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 19.8. Intermediate Cycle is negative and falling. Short term cycle is negative and rising. Market direction:- Sell. Fractal Bias – Bearish.
Agriculture (DBA) ETF closed at 17.08 with a high closing doji candle below its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 0.28. Intermediate Cycle is negative and falling. Short term cycle is negative and rising. Market direction:- Sell. Fractal Bias – Bearish.
Commodities (DBC) ETF closed at 17.49 with a bullish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 0.469. Intermediate Cycle is positive and falling slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
Bond futures (/ZB) closed at 140'15 with a bearish candle below its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 2.25. Intermediate Cycle is negative and falling slope. Short term cycle is negative and falling slope. Market direction:- Sell. It is in a Squeeze. Fractal Bias – Bearish.
High Yield bond ETF (HYG) closed at 86.24 with a spinning top doji candle above its 8 EMA and 21 EMA and below its 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 0.43. Intermediate Cycle is negative and rising slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Neutral. It is in a Squeeze. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
The dollar index ($DXY) closed at 94.216 with a bearish marubozu candle below its 8 EMA and on its 21 EMA and above its 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 1.164. Intermediate Cycle is positive and falling slope. Short term cycle is positive and falling slope. Market direction:- Sell. It is in a Weekly Squeeze. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
EUR/USD closed at 1.1751 with a bullish marubozu candle above its 8 EMA and 21 EMA and below its 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 0.0184. Intermediate Cycle is negative and rising slope. Short term cycle is negative and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
USD/JPY closed at 112.54 with a bullish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 1.209. Intermediate Cycle is positive and rising. Short term cycle is positive and rising. Market direction:- Buy. It is in a monthly Squeeze. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
6S (Swiss Franc) closed at 1.0515 with a bullish candle above its 8 EMA, 21 EMA and 50 SMA. Weekly trading range was 0.0169. Intermediate Cycle is positive and rising slope. Short term cycle is positive and rising slope. Market direction:- Buy. It is in monthly Squeeze. Fractal Bias – Bullish.
On a monthly lookback, the relative strength order of the ETFs that are outperforming the S&P 500 are XLI, XLE, XLB, XLV, XLP and XLF respectively.
On a 3-monthly lookback, the relative strength order of the ETFs that are outperforming the S&P 500 are XLV, XLI and XLF respectively.
Market Sentiment is bullish. Market Breadth is sloping downwards showing more losers than gainers. Volume Acc/Dis is sloping upwards showing accumulation. Skew is at 141.55. Vix is at 11.68 and Vix futures 14.3.
Market internals are sending mix message. Market breadth is weakening with more losers than gainers and accumulation is gathering on fewer and fewer stocks. Vix is below 12 and Vix futures is above 14 which means that traders are prepared for near term volatility. Skew is back to normal level. The prognosis is for a near term volatile market with a bullish bias.


National Cancer Survivors Day 2012, held this past Sunday, June 3, is a Celebration of Life held throughout the U.S, Canada and other participating countries. Survivors participate in an event to show the world that life after a cancer diagnosis can be meaningful and productive.
Who is a cancer survivor? Anyone living with a history of cancer – from the moment of diagnosis through the remainder of their life.
My family and I celebrated by spending the day with several families at our annual Lakefest! We all had a great time playing with our kids, boating, swimming, hanging out, eating good BBQ and other scrumptious food thanks to our hosts. On NCSD 2011, I had just finished my chemo treatment after surgery so I just spent time at the lake taking it easy and watching everyone have fun. My what a difference a year makes!


In this report, our firm have gathered the recent decisions, notifications, announcements and guidelines issued by Turkey's Data Protection Authority ("Authority") in February 2019.
Between January 31, 2019 and February 20, 2019, Turkey's six automobile leasing and rent-a-car companies notified Turkey's Data Protection Authority ("Authority") that personal data of their clients might have been stolen. The Authority decided to publish these six companies' data breach notifications on its web-site.
All five notification have one common name, "Optimum", as a reason of the notifications. Optimum is the road-assistance, repair, towing services provider with which all of these five companies have business relationship. Reportedly, Optimum was targeted by a cyber-attack and the data kept in Optimum's database was accessed by unauthorized users.
Article 12 (5) of the Law on the Protection of Personal Data No. 6698 ("Law") requires that if the personal data is obtained by third parties through unlawful means, the data controller shall notify the data subject together with the Authority.
The Authority published Optimum's own data breach notification on January 25, 2019. In short, Optimum says "we know we have been attacked but we do not know the damage yet". Also, adds "We are preparing a detailed technical report". In January, as a first wave of data breach notifications in automobile-leasing industry, three companies notified the Authority as to the cyber-attack that targeted Optimum. So, in total, ten companies, including Optimum, applied to the Authority with data breach notifications.
The other common aspect of the notifications is that the companies are not sure on how many people's data affected by the cyber-attack. Moreover, the authority or the companies still do not know whether or not the data copied or somehow stolen by the hackers. Though the companies are not sure on the number of the individuals whose data was stolen, they have some estimates. One estimates that 4,000 individuals' data was stolen, manipulated or somehow affected. Other one says at least 90 of its clients' data was likely to be stolen. The highest estimate mouthed until now is 90,000. Among many uncertainties, it is clear that the investigations are still ongoing and we will likely to hear more data breach notifications in March.
Note: There are also two other data breach notifications published on the Authority's web-site in February. One submitted by a Travel Agency company reporting that 67.519 individuals' data might have been copied unlawfully. The other one is from a hotel. The hotel was targeted by a cyber-attack and the Hotel's back-up data was deleted by the hackers.
The complainant filed to the Authority petitioning that the complainant's private health data being shared by his/her pharmacy with a third party without complying with the processing requirements.
Article 6 of the Law regulates the processing of special categories of personal data. According to this article, health-related data is in special categories of data and cannot be processed without the explicit consent of the data subject. Health-related data can only be processed without explicit consent by the persons or authorities that are authorized to maintain; public health protection, preventive medicine, medical diagnosis, treatment and care services, and for the confidentiality of health care services.
Article 8 of the Law regulates that the personal data cannot be transferred to a third party without explicit consent from the data subject, and Article 12 prohibits the data processers and controllers to share data with third parties unlawfully. Data controllers that do not comply with the law may be subject to administrative fines minimum of TRY 15.000 and maximum of 1.000.000 pursuant Article 18 of the Law.
The Authority has determined that the data processing of the pharmacy was unlawful and imposed administrative fine pursuant to Article 18 of the Law.
A complainant alleged that his/her personal information made unlawfully accessible by a online shopping web-site to other customers of the web-site. The complainant had submitted a request to the company for his/her personal data kept by the company to be deleted, destroyed, rendered unreachable from their database, , and if shared with another party, to be deleted and destroyed by those databases as well. After this request, the complainant filed to the Authority complaining that the company's response was insufficient.
Article 12 of the Law regulates that the data controller is obliged to prevent the unlawful processing and access of personal data and to take necessary preventions and safety measures. Article 7 of the Law regulates that if the personal data is no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which it was collected or otherwise processed, the data controller has to erase destroy or anonymize the data. Article 11 of the Law grants the data subjects' right to know if their data has been transferred to the third parties. Also, under the Article 7, data subjects are entitled to request their personal data to be erased or deleted.
The Authority concluded that the measures taken by the company were not adequate and decided to impose an administrative fine to the company in accordance with Article 18 of the Law. Additionally, the company has been ordered to meet the request of the complainant within 30 days.
The public officers had made a request for the destruction of their documents related to the investigation files opened during the course of their civil service. Then the officers applied to the Authority since their request to the public authority was not fulfilled.
Article 7 of the Law requires that if the personal data is no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which it was collected or otherwise processed, the data controller has to erase, destroy or anonymize the data. Article 109 of the Law No. 657, Civil Servant Law, states that a personnel file will be kept for each officer, the file contains the professional information of the officer, the declarations of the goods; if any, the examination, investigation, audit reports, disciplinary penalties, and information and documents related to awards documents. In section D of the Public Staff General Communiqué (Serial No: 2), it has been regulated that the personnel files of the officers whose duties are terminated in any way will be kept by the institutions.
The Authority held that the data controller's rejection to the officers' request was lawful.
Article 13 of the Law sets the principles of the request made to the data controller. Under Article 13, requests must be made in writing and the data controller shall conclude the request as soon as possible and within thirty days at the latest, free of charge according to its nature. Due to the article's ambiguous language structure, there has been differences on how the article interpreted. The Authority issued a guidance on the Article 13.
In the event that a response is submitted within 30 days by the data controller, the data subject can make a complaint within 30 days following the response. Therefore, there is no 60-day period from the date of the request to the data controller in such cases.
In the event that the request is not answered by the data controller, the data subject can make a complaint to the Authority within 60 days of the date of the request to the data controller.


with the default managers being nautilus (Ubuntu) and thunar (Xubuntu).
Wait a moment for the command to process, and you should be good to go. If you have any further questions, include them in the comments here, or ask the experts over at the Ubuntu forums.


text:
Boycott group to UNESCO: Protect heritage of all cultures
The following is an open letter sent to Director-General of UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura on 14 February 2008
Tuesday, February 19,2008 04:43
by Dr. Gabi Baramki and Dr. Carmela Armanios Omary Electronicintifada.net
Open Letter, Dr. Gabi Baramki and Dr. Carmela Armanios Omary, 18 February 2008
The following is an open letter sent to Director-General of UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura on 14 February 2008:
Dear Mr. Matsuura,
On behalf of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), we are writing to express our deep concern about your statements, quoted in The Jerusalem Post (7 February 2008), during your recent visit to Israel. These statements were one-sided, completely ignoring Israel"s continuous crimes against Palestinian history and heritage.
Tel Aviv"s "White City" is now one of five Israeli locations named in the World Heritage List under the auspices of UNESCO. It is known that UNESCO [the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] aims to preserve ancient buildings and protect them as part of human heritage, but that should apply to all cultures. While preserving such sites in Israel, UNESCO is expected to explain what role it has played to date in stopping Israel from or holding it accountable for destroying ancient Palestinian buildings, irreversibly damaging Palestinian landscapes, littering them with illegal colonies and apartheid roads; systematically covering up and/or expropriating historical Islamic and Christian sites that attest to the deep-rooted Arab civilization in Palestine, especially in Jerusalem; and the unethical and illegal use of architecture and archaeology to reinvent the place"s history, as documented in several ground-breaking studies by conscientious Israeli, among other, scientists.
Did UNESCO act in order to stop Israel"s systematic destruction of Nablus"s Khadra Mosque, established in 1250; its ancient soap factories built during the Ottoman era; its Greek Orthodox church; its Yasminah neighbourhood, mostly built 200 years ago; or parts of its 500-year-old kasbah? What did UNESCO do about the tens of mosques and churches that were destroyed by Israel in 1948 or occupied and turned into bars, barns, commercial centers or other facilities benefiting only Jewish Israelis? Is UNESCO planning to take any action in order to stop the implementation of the recent Israeli authorities" decision to demolish the al-Omari mosque (700 years old) in the village of Umm Tuba near Jerusalem under the pretext that the building had been built without a license?
During your visit to [the Holocaust memorial] Yad Vashem, you defended UNESCO"s general conference resolution calling to promote awareness of Holocaust remembrance. You stated that "It"s important to maintain the remembrance of the Holocaust, but it"s equally important to teach the lessons to children and young people, with the idea of eliminating discrimination and anti-Semitism." Eliminating racial discrimination in all forms is indeed a noble goal that we all agree on. But shouldn"t that history of crimes against humanity prompt UNESCO to play a more active role in preventing similar crimes everywhere? But how, we are compelled to ask, is UNESCO addressing the current war crimes that Israel is committing against the Palestinians? The crimes of Israel"s systematic and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people take three basic forms: its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories; its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens; and its denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, in contravention of UN resolutions.
Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned right to return to their homes and receive compensation, simply because they are "non-Jews." It persists in its blatant denial of fundamental Palestinian human rights, in contravention of international humanitarian law and human rights conventions. It still commits successive war crimes in Lebanon and Palestine, the most recent one is the slow genocide against a million and a half Palestinians in the besieged and collectively-punished Gaza Strip. Do you find this an appropriate time to praise Israel and insist on rehabilitating its membership in UN bodies? Why is UNESCO, which led the struggle to isolate South African apartheid in the "70s and "80s of the last century accepting to be complicit, whether intentionally or not, in perpetuating Israeli apartheid?
Israel"s attack on the Palestinians did not stop at expropriating land and destroying historical buildings and agricultural land. The Palestinian educational system was, and still is, under systematic attack. Over the past few decades, Israel"s occupation forces have imprisoned tens of thousands of Palestinian students and faculty. Israel has exiled, tortured, or wounded thousands of others. University campuses have been routinely shut down - for several consecutive years, in some cases -- by military order as punishment for student activism against the occupation. Under the current regime of closures, curfews and the vast network of military roadblocks and the Wall, normal life, including the pursuit of education, has become impossible for Palestinians.
Many reports, including a UNESCO report in 1980 and another in 1987, documented the Israeli violations of freedom of expression, and freedom of education. In July 2004 the International Court of Justice in the Hague declared the Israeli apartheid Wall as illegal because of its harsh disruption of lives of the Palestinians. But Israel continued building it, inflicting great damage to the Palestinian landscape, economy and society, as well as medical and educational services. But how, we are compelled to ask again, is UNESCO addressing the current crimes that Israel is committing against Palestinian educational institutions?
We call on you, Mr. Matsuura, to implement the UNESCO mission without double standards. The least peace and justice loving people would expect from you is to work towards protecting Palestinian lives and heritage from Israel"s colonial and racist policies.
Dr. Gabi Baramki, founding member of PACBI
Dr. Carmela Armanios Omary, founding member of PACBI
Posted in Palestine
Khatib: Israel's settlement activity in Jerusalem a blow to the PA negotiator
Aqsa: Israeli excavations caused collapse in the Aqsa Mosque's yards
Israel plans 10,000 new settlement units in eastern Jerusalem
BOOK REVIEW: Lords of the Land - The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories
IOA demolishes Palestinian flats in O. Jerusalem, allows Jews to build
Salah: IOA plans biggest synagogue inside the Aqsa
MP Abu Tair: Jerusalem is a red line
Hamas: Israel expedites steps to destroy the Aqsa Mosque
Haaretz: Israeli gov't published a bid for building 440 settlement units in OJ
Jerusalem.. 5,000 Years of Arab History
Israel to build new settlement in the West Bank
More Serious Excavations Target Al Aqsa Mosque
Redwan: Only on our dead bodies Israel could destroy the Aqsa Mosque
Israeli Politics Of 'Archeology' In Jerusalem
Hanna: Israel plots to wipe out Christian-Islamic landmarks in Jerusalem
Israeli Schemes For Displacing Jerusalem, Negev Palestinians
Sabri, Salah Warn of Ongoing Digs Near Al-Aqsa Mosque
UNESCO Urges Halt of Aqsa Digging

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I went to a scrapbook sale on Friday night and got a Paper pack from Crate Hill Papers for such a good deal! I have loved these papers ever since I got a few in a scrapbook kit I bought so I was thrilled to find the whole pack. I hadn't even known it was sold in a pack! Of course here you are just seeing the reverse side of the papers but I thought they worked for this layout and quote.
Sorry the quote is a bit crooked. Even with a grid acrylic block, when stamping on a curvy shape, it is hard to get it straight. Next time I will lay it out on my cutting mat using the grid on it to keep the die cut shape straight. The buckle is a die cut from the pack. The ribbon and the DP look much better together IRL.
This card was made using a fabulous sketch from Madelynn for Whimsical Wednesdays. You can see that I stretched the sketch to make my card and I replaced the sentiment with a flower. So did you love all the awesome cards from last week? I sure did! I hope some of you played, I'll be on the lookout when I make the rounds this week. This week the keyword is DDSC8 (not 08) and don't forget to link your card up to the comments section of this week's post. I can't wait to see your work and all the fabulous eye candy from the DareDevils. Heather may be playing late and Debbie can't play this week but be sure to visit everyone else to see their creations this week!!!
Last but NEVER least, the fabulous Cassie has awarded all of us DareDevils with an ***AWESOME*** blog award! Woooo Hoooo!!!!
I am so honoured! Thanks so much to Cassie! Now ready for the fun part?
1. Where is your cell phone? Beside me!
3. Your mother? Wonderfully generous!
5. Your favourite food? Chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate!!!
6. Your dream last night? Can't remember any which is good 'cause the last one I remember was like a horror movie.
8. Your dream/goal? Keep God first in my life. Raise happy, healthy kids who treat others in the way they want to be treated. Always maintain a healthy marriage. Get on a fabulous design team.
10. Your hobby? Stamping, reading and scrapbooking.
11. Your fear? Insects especially spiders!
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? In the same place I am now, possibly the SAHM mom of three?
18. Last thing you did? Woke up my son for school.
20. Your TV? 24" boring, standard TV with bad sound (we listen through some other gadget DH has set up).
27. Something you're not wearing? It is not quite 8 am – bra!
31. Last time you cried? Watching Oprah on Monday when she featured a show about moms who drive drunk, one killed 8 people.
Ink: Chalk Ink-chestnut brown, cocoa-SU!
Beautiful card! Love the soft colors and that sentiment is gorgeous!Ha, my last dream was probably a horror movie, too!! And, a box of Copics is a great wish list item!
This looks great. Good job!!I really enjoyed reading your survey. That was so much fun!!
Great job on the sketch Rebecca! Very pretty. I also enjoyed reading your "getting to know you" questions. That was fun for us to do!
this turned out great – love how you lined it up on the edge! enjoyed all your answers – esp. the dreams/goals one — so glad you weren't "brief" and just spoke from your heart!


Rs-LIBMAN is a Windows based software, which is fully integrated with Barcodes and RFID. The Issue and Return, the Dynamic Location Tagging and Stock Verification is also done with the help of barcodes or RFID. This provides the Librarian with an easy, accurate and a quick method of having complete command over the library.
The major problems faced by librarians at libraries are accurate management of stocks, issue/return of books, proper shelving of books, checking availability maintaining members details etc. Most of the libraries uses a manual entry system for maintenance of records. But manual entries is likely to cause errors and mismatch in stocks. Improper positioning of any book may result in searching for hours to find that book. Taking all these issues in account we found the need for a strongly built system to carry out the task with ease and assist librarians to do their job more accurately and swiftly. So LIBMAN was built with view to cover all aspects of a library management.
Faster stock taking process by just scanning the barcode on each book.
Issue and return process is much more faster and accurate as compared to manual process.
Easily track the current location of books.
RFID labels can be read without contact or particular orientation. This reduces materials handling, speeds inventory control tasks, and makes circulation process fast, easy and accurate.
Line- of- sight is not necessary.
Several RFID labels can be read at once- further accelerating all scanning activities.
RFID integration is available in two different frequencies High Frequency & Ultra High Frequency.
Self-Issue Kiosks for automatic issue/return of books.
RS-LIBMAN is a robust window based Library Management software which satisfies the complete need of the librarian. It facilitates the close monitoring of books, CD / VCD's, magazines, journals, vendors, departments, etc. as the updating process is ONLINE. So as soon as a book is issued, returned, freshly taken into stocks, etc. the system updates the data immediately. Paper work is drastically reduced as complete monitoring is done through the computer. There is no necessity of issue slips/issue cards, library cards or book cards. It is vastly time saving as the time required to track and retrieve a book from a shelf is reduced even when the book is not kept at its right place. Errors due to manual entry into a computer is reduced/obliterated. Frequent stock-taking can be carried out more systematically. Vis-a-vis manual checking can be done which saves the valuable time of the Librarians. It generate reminders for late/missed deliveries, expiry of membership, overdue books, etc. Providing the members with an extremely powerful OPAC (Online Public Access Control). Hence it is suitable for small & big libraries, and also for multi locational Libraries.
This system is easy enough to be operated by library professionals and powerful enough to be able to handle large databases.
A system which is compatible to the international standards of MARC.
RS-LIBMAN: Designed To Meet All The Needs Of A Librarian.
Maintaining database of members, books, CD / VCD's, magazines, journals, vendors, departments, etc.
Purchase invoicing, Delivery monitoring, etc.
Generating reminders for late/missed deliveries; expiry of membership, over due books, etc.
Locating even the mis-shelved books due to Dynamic Location Tagging.
Being able to take faster and accurate stocks.
Doing away with library cards and book cards.
Ensuring faster and accurate issue and return.
Providing the members with an extremely powerful OPAC.
Having a system which is easy to operate by library professionals and powerful enough to be able to handle large databases.
Customization as per your library's environment.
The backend is available in MS-ACCESS/SQL.


I have a two different slots for senior sessions: mid afternoon and early evening. Those looking for those golden hour portraits, I would recommend you select the early evening slot. Times later in the fall will be earlier due to daylight savings. Dates/times will be booked on a first come, first serve basis. Upon submission of this form, you will receive an email with confirmation of your date and time from me within a few days. We will decide on location from there!
Requests with this form must be made at a minimum of 2 WEEKS before session date. Please call 319.651.7174 if scheduling within a closer time frame.
Note: I do have some mornings available on the Saturday dates. If you are interested, please put that in the "additional comments" section below. Otherwise, all senior sessions will be between 3pm and 8pm.


When looking at the history of Alice Lloyd College, you will see many faces that have played a major role in its growth over the years. Few, however, are more familiar than that of our very own Dr. Jerry Wayne Slone, Associate Professor of Business.
He was born February 24, 1958, in Ary, Kentucky, to his parents, Claude Bartlett and Jessie Niece Slone. Upon graduating from high school in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1976, he was faced with the decision of where to attend college. Jerry already had deep roots established at Alice Lloyd College through his paternal grandparents; his grandfather is none other than Commodore Slone, the man responsible for constructing a large majority of the campus buildings and the name behind ALC's new Commodore Slone Business and Technology Center. Slone was drawn to ALC through his search for a connection to his heritage and his grandparents.
"My grandparents firmly believed in two things: God and education," he said.
Jerry graduated from ALC in 1978. He then attended the University of Kentucky, earning a Bachelor of Science in Accounting in 1979, and a Master's in Business Administration in 1981. Throughout this time, he was able to utilize ALC's Caney Cottage, a housing facility for ALC graduates pursuing further education at University of Kentucky.
Upon graduating from the University of Kentucky, he returned to ALC in the fall of 1981 to take on a teaching position. A few short years later he became a licensed Certified Public Accountant and began working for other CPAs and eventually the Kentucky Revenue Cabinet.
In 1986, Jerry decided to pursue a degree in law at the University of Louisville.
He earned his Juris Doctor in 1989 and returned to Hindman, Kentucky, to practice law with Bill Weinberg, Randy Campbell, and Randy Slone. He became a partner at the firm in 1993 and opened his private practice in 1998, which he still maintains today.
In 2001, at the age of 43, Jerry was offered a full-time position as a college instructor by ALC's Academic Dean, Mary Lee James.
Thirteen years after Dean James's phone call, Slone can still be found bestowing wisdom and knowledge upon ALC students.
His hard work at ALC earned him both titles of Alumnus of the Year and Teacher of the Year. However, when asked what he believed to be his greatest accomplishment, a diploma or award was not the answer.
Jerry recently completed his Doctorate in Education from the University of the Cumberlands. As a man with many titles under his belt, we could not help but ask Slone what his next adventure will be.


Does weighting industries differently matter? In finite samples ordinary and weighted least squares yield different parameter estimates. On balance, the answer appears to be "maybe." Instances where weighting does not change the qualitative results include Krueger's work on the 1990s (and the extensions thereof in Table 1). BC offer the most insight on this issue with their very thorough reporting of both unweighted and weighted results using both employment and output as weights. For the 1960s and 1980s results look very similar across the weighted and unweighted specifications. But for manufacturing industries during the 1970s weighting seems to matter much more. Their unweighted results suggest a mandated fall in inequality but their weighted results–particularly with output weights–suggest a mandated rise in inequality. This difference seems particularly important when compared with Leamer's conclusion that the 1970s was the "Stolper-Samuelson decade" with a large rise in mandated inequality. Leamer's reports this finding only for weighted specifications, not unweighted ones. Employment and value-added weights give similar results, but that "unweighted regressions are entirely different" (fn. 5, p. 29).
Different decades appear to have different product-price trends. Assuming for the moment that the evidence presented in the previous studies is correct, on balance it appears that the U.S. prices of less-skilled-labor-intensive products relative to more-skilled-labor-intensive products held relatively constant during the 1960s and 1980s but declined during the 1970s and 1990s. Thus it is important not to generalize about "the" pattern in U.S. product prices without specifying the particular time period. For example, Krueger concludes that his evidence of declining relative prices during the 1990s "is consistent with Sachs and Shatz (1994), but inconsistent with Lawrence and Slaughter (1993)" (p. 19). Because SS and LS analyze the 1980s, not the 1990s, it is not clear that there should be any necessary relationship among results across different decades.
Importantly, the results for each given decade appear to be fairly robust to the endpoints chosen. For example, LS, Leamer, and BC all find no strong trend in manufacturing relative prices during the 1980s even though each study dates the decade slightly differently.


text:
Warin van Keulen, ook Vuerin, (? - Keulen, 21 september 985) was een 10e-eeuwse geestelijke en staatsman. Hij was onder meer aartsbisschop van Keulen.

Levensbeschrijving
Over de afkomst, de geboorteplaats of de geboortedatum van aartsbisschop Warin is niets bekend. Waarschijnlijk maakte hij voor zijn verkiezing tot aartsbisschop wel al deel uit van het Keulse Domkapittel. In 976 volgde hij aartsbisschop Gero op als aartsbisschop van Keulen.

In 983 vertrouwde keizer Otto II hem de opvoeding van zijn zoon Otto III toe. Op eerste kerstdag 983 kroonde hij, samen met de aartsbisschoppen Willigis van Mainz en Johannes van Ravenna, de 3-jarige Otto III tot Rooms-koning. Kort daarop gaf hij de voogdij over Otto III, conform het verwantschaprecht (ius propinquitatis), maar tegen de wil van zijn moeder Theophanu en zijn grootmoeder Adelheid van Bourgondië, aan de naaste mannelijke bloedverwant, hertog Hendrik II van Beieren (bijgenaamd "de Ruziezoeker"). Deze Hendrik II zat wegens een gewapend conflict gevangen in Utrecht, maar werd onmiddellijk na de dood van Otto II door bisschop Folcmar van Utrecht vrijgelaten. Na enkele mislukte pogingen om zelf tot koning gekozen te worden, daarin gesteund door Warin en enkele Beierse bisschoppen, gaf Hendrik het koninklijke kind op 29 juni 984 in het Thüringse Rohr terug aan zijn moeder en grootmoeder.

Tussen 981 en 985 had Warin een conflict met de abt van de abdij Mönchengladbach, die meer genegen was te luisteren naar Notger, de prins-bisschop van Luik, dan naar Warin. Warin verving de abt door een ander, die echter binnen de kortste keren de bezittingen van de abdij, inclusief de relieken, te gelde maakte.

Warin faciliteerde, net als zijn opvolger Everger, de komst van Ierse monniken naar Keulse kloosters. Gedurende zijn episcopaat steunde hij de Ier Minnborinus als abt van het klooster Groß Sankt Martin. Na zijn dood op 21 september 985 werd aartsbisschop Warin in de abdijkerk van Groß Sankt Martin bijgezet.

Bronnen, noten
 Oedinger, Friedrich Wilhelm, Geschichte des Erzbistums Köln, Deel I. Keulen, 1972

Keulen, Warin
10e-eeuws bisschop

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
package com.tern.web.routes;

public class RouteException extends RuntimeException
{
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    public RouteException(String message, Throwable cause)
    {
        super(message, cause);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


I really care about baseball's steroid issue. I've found, however, that I am among the minority and that disturbs me.
Many passionate fans care about the steroid issue because it affects the integrity of the game, and it sullies the reputations of players who have been idolized by their fans. For me, the issue comes down to something as basic as cheating. Using illegal performance-enhancing drugs to one-up your competition is cheating. Just like corking your bat is cheating. Just like throwing a game is cheating. The fact that Major League Baseball had not explicitly outlawed steroid use before the 2002 Collective Bargaining Agreement does not validate any steroid use before 2002. It's all cheating.
To understand this steroid phenomenon, it's necessary to explore just how baseball, its fans and the media have built up a system where drug use is acceptable and encouraged. The deepest root of this evil – like many – is the promise of more money, more home runs, more fans. Would a steroid-less Giambi have received a $120 million contract offer? Would Jose Canseco have received his own overvalued $25 million contract back in the late 1980s without his steroid-fueled MVP campaign? Of course not. The drive for greed has led many players to drugs that will mess them up later in life.
But it's not just the players who are to blame. The owners, managers and general managers can't walk away scot-free. Tony La Russa says he knew that Jose Canseco was juicing up. The Yankees supposedly removed the word steroid from Jason Giambi's contract. This is nothing new. In 1976, according to Wednesday's New York Times, then-Twins executive Clark Griffith wanted a mandatory drug testing program and mandatory treatment for players abusing drugs and alcohol. The general managers voted it down, and as they told Griffith, they wouldn't report a player without first checking out his stats.
Can this really come as a surprise to anyone? Of course not. Baseball managers and general managers are not oblivious to what goes on in the clubhouse, and they're not blind either. When a player looks different physically and hits the ball with a little more pop in his bat without hitting the gym, something isn't natural. But the game is about winning. Why would you rat out your best players?
Then, there is the media, possibly the guiltiest party in the entire scandal. The media is having a field day with the steroid scandal. CBS garnered high ratings from the Canseco interview; the story is splashed across tabloids across the country; and columnists on the web are audaciously suggesting that Barry Bonds retire before he further sullies some of baseball's exalted records. Self-righteousness reigns supreme in the press.
But something's not right because these are same sports commentators who lapped up the McGwire-Sosa 1998 home run race. These are the same sports commentators who were enthralled by Bonds' 2001 pursuit of the home run record and are eagerly counting down the at-bats until he reaches 715, 756, and beyond. The media once trumpeted the offensive age of baseball as they applauded the game for drawing in fans to fill the seats after the strike of 1994-1995 saw a decline in baseball popularity.
If more home runs means more coverage and more coverage means more revenue, then the press – the Fourth Estate of American life – is just as guilty for encouraging steroid use as managers are for ignoring a drug problem in baseball's clubhouses.
Furthermore, the media loves everything that sells. They love home runs; they love steroids. It's the great hypocrisy of the press. One season, they'll tout the great offensive explosions; the next winter, Murray Chass will wax poetic about the pressures of the new drug policy. And that's where the fans come into play.
This is the trickiest piece of the puzzle. Are the fans to blame? Yes, but not for the obvious reasons. The fans are to blame because they don't care enough about the steroid scandal and how it affects the integrity of the game. In a recent unscientific SportsNation poll on ESPN, more fans by a 51-49 margin, said that competitive balance was the biggest problem facing the game, not steroids. And this comes after a five-year stretch in which five different teams won the World Series. Drug use, folks, is now more acceptable than having five out of six divisions feature wide-open races this season. (Only the AL East will be a two-team dog fight.) If these SportsNation voters are only those interested enough to seek out the poll to vote, I can only imagine the apathy the rest of baseball's more casual fans feel about steroids.
But the fans do care about the publicity. Canseco's book was the number three seller on Amazon the day it was released. Millions of people eat up steroid news everyday. These fans, however, only seem to want more names and more details. They want gossip and innuendo. They want to know who has done what and how.
All of this stems from one overarching belief that many fans share: As long as their team's players produce on the field, it doesn't matter what happens off the field. This isn't to say that everyone feels this way; I know plenty of people who are highly disappointed that players would stoop to steroid use. But these sentiments can be found everywhere among baseball fans.
I, for one, do not approve. We baseball fans should care about what baseball players do in the locker room. We should care what players who are admired by young and old alike do with their bodies. We should care about the fact that cheating is becoming a socially acceptable phenomenon in the game called America's Pastime. While many baseball fans want to leave the steroid issue behind and just focus on the games, it's time for baseball fans to demand accountability and integrity from the greatest game on Earth.
The story no one in baseball wants to hear – rumors about steroid use – reared its ugly head once again this weekend.
With little more than a week left before pitchers and catchers report to training camps in warm locales, the steroid scandal is once again splashed across the sports pages of newspapers across the country. This weekend's revelations focused around former Major Leaguer Jose Canseco and his upcoming book entitled Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big.
According to the New York Daily News, Canseco delivered on his promise to name names and point fingers. He accuses former teammates Mark McGwire and Jason Giambi of shooting up. He reportedly implicates famous sluggers who played with him on the Texas Rangers and even goes so far as to take a swipe at President George W. Bush, claiming that Bush knew that his players were using performance-enhancing drugs when he owned the Rangers in the 1990s.
Players, managers, and agents have of course already begun their damage control. Tony La Russa and Dave McKay, two coaches who led the A's during Canseco's time with the team, disputed the leaked material from the book. In The New York Times, La Russa stuck up for his former star slugger. "He's hurting for money and he needs to make a score. What's a more sensational thing to say, and who's a more sensational target to pick than Mark?�? he said.
Meanwhile, the Daily News claims that the leaked book, set to hit stores right at the start of Spring Training on Feb. 21, is already creating a stir among the higher-ups in Major League Baseball and the Players' Association as they prepare for the worst. Yet, the issue is not a clear cut one, and it will only become further complicated as more information about the book is released. In the end, baseball could use this latest diversion to leave steroid use firmly in the past.
First, as La Russa pointed out, there's the issue of Jose Canseco's credibility. Truth be told, Canseco is not the most reliable of sources. He's always had a tumultuous relationship with the media and has been into and out of trouble more often than he's been traded. Anything he says should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
However, since Ken Caminiti's 2002 admission to steroid use during his MVP season and the BALCO testimony that rocked the baseball world this winter, more people have been willing to listen to these steroid allegations. As ESPN contributor Mark Kriedler wrote back in 2002, "But what Ken Caminiti is saying, if you'll take the time to find his words, is that the Jose Cansecos of the baseball world are far more right than wrong.�?
Second, compounded with the issue of Canseco's credibility is the unfortunate (for the author, at least) timing of the book. This winter saw more than its fair share of steroid stories. Leaked Grand Jury testimony sealed the fates of certain sluggers while the development of a new steroid policy showed that baseball was ready to address a serious problem. Now, Canseco's book really does seem like the icing on the cake. By releasing the book now, it is as though Canseco just wants to cash in on a public itching to hear more about what All Stars, what future Hall of Famers, and what average players juiced up during the past 15 years.
In response, already embattled Major League coaches such as La Russa and McKay are vehemently backing their players. But is that the right move to make? I don't think Canseco's book should be taken for much more than a gossipmonger trying to pick up a quick buck, but that's only in terms of the namedropping. The real message of Canseco's warnings – that, at one point, 80 percent of Major Leaguers used steroids – is much more likely to be true, and this isn't something Major League Baseball can sweep under the rug.
It's admirable that managers stand behind their superstars, but that is not the right move to make anymore. With a public that grows increasingly skeptical anytime a La Russa says that a Mark McGwire, a known user of Androstenodione, is completely innocent of using performing enhancing drugs, it's time for Major League Baseball to reassess its responses to these steroid revelations no matter how dubious the source may be.
This raises a sticky question: Should Major League Baseball and the Players' Association out steroid users in an effort to reclaim the purity of the game? If players stepped forward or were outed by their peers, the argument goes, the public would begin to believe those who claimed not to be users. These moves would also restore confidence in the integrity of today's game. But considering the strength of the Players' Association and the delicate nature of the controversy, it's probably not the best idea for players to out their peers and thus alienate what could be a large percentage of the union. However, coaches and teammates could be better off if they remained silent on this issue instead of rushing to the defense of every nice guy or hard-working player implicated in the scandal.
In the end, Major League Baseball is in a Catch-22 situation. They shouldn't publicly out those who used steroids during the Juiced Era, but those involved in the game shouldn't be turning a blind eye to reality. This isn't to say that Mark McGwire is definitely guilty and that Jose Canseco is telling the truth. But if Major League Baseball is truly intent on leaving the steroid scandal in the past, the iron wall of support for all players should come down.
Records and personal achievements of superstars from the past 15 years will always be in doubt in the public mind. Here's to hoping that the next 15 years won't produce an environment for any more asterisks, suspicions, syringes, or gossip-driven books.


text:
package fr.lium.model

case class Speaker(
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you in," it was a loving instruction that came from a place of confidence and leadership.
I had a complete shift within me, I felt different.
smiled at him and nodded, he smiled back.
at me. I closed my eyes and rattled off the latitude and longitude of our first location.
The words appeared in my mind the moment I thought of it.
way if you don't mind!" he scolded.


It's been over 10 years since I started working in the non-profit sector. After graduating from university, I hopped around various charities in London before getting a Masters in International Development, hoping to crack into the NGO-world (think Oxfam or Save the Children, rather than Cancer Research, or the Dogs Trust).
I knew from a young age that I never wanted to enter the corporate world. But two other events spurred my interest in poverty-relief around the time I graduated. One was the 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people across Asia. Seeing the images of devastation on TV and reading stories of families torn apart was truly heart-breaking, and made me want to get involved somehow.
The other event was the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign. Bono and Bob Geldof were the key figureheads, but the campaign brought together a whole range of NGOs under a united banner. I volunteered at some of these campaign events, feeling like I was doing my bit to end poverty (my opinion has since matured somewhat).
However, it was only by moving to Thailand and taking up a job working directly with marginalised communities in the region that I realised that my original (Western) perceptions of poverty in developing countries was completely wrong.
Now that I'm on a career break, I've had time to think about the lessons I've learned working with marginalised communities in South-East Asia, how my perceptions have changed since I started out, and how this relates to financial independence.
You'll notice in this post I say marginalised communities, not poor people. I no longer call people poor, because this reduces their status to a pure monetary level. Sure, maybe they are living at subsistence level, where they have just enough to survive. But marginalised communities typically have other forms of wealth that we overlook.
Their wealth often lies in their community: in hardened circumstances, communities grow stronger and more resilient. If there is a bad harvest one season, the community might come together and share their resources until the next. The community provides emotional, and often spiritual support.
Vicki Robin, co-author of Your Money or Your Life and early financial independence leader, talks of the importance of social capital; building local communities where people take care of each other, without the need for money. Social capital already exists in many communities, but mainstream development prioritises monetary value over social ties.
Land is often another important form of wealth for such communities. Communities that have been settled for generations usually have land title. The land comes with access to other valuable natural resources: water, soil, fruit-bearing trees, etc. But because they may not generate much income from these resources, they are considered poor. They are financially independent in a sense – not reliant on a wage to meet their basic needs.
If you take a community's land, give each family $2,000 in compensation, and the parents a back-breaking job in a factory, does that make them wealthier? According to mainstream economic thinking, yes it does. But that's overlooking the long-term loss of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and strength of the community.
Across South-East Asia, huge swathes of land are being grabbed by governments and corporations, with the purpose of spurring economic growth. The communities are meant to benefit through newly-created jobs in the formal economy. But these jobs are frequently low-paid, precarious, and dangerous – and often designed to produce garments or gadgets for those of us in the West to consume at a rock-bottom prices.
Job creation does matter – younger generations have different ambitions from their parents after all, and they need access to different opportunities. But we have to make sure that these jobs are not exploitative, nor come at the expense of other forms of wealth.
Once the older generations move on, they can usually pass their land onto their children. But once they've lost the land, they've lost a valuable asset.
The world has made huge progress in reducing extreme poverty. More than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990, which is a remarkable achievement.
But most of this poverty reduction was in China, where western charities have had little penetration. Secondly, this is still using a really crude form of measuring poverty, which doesn't consider wealth in other forms.
I wanted to get into international development because I wanted to save the world, but I realise now that they are capable of saving themselves. These communities know their own needs and how best to meet them.
I do still believe in the power of giving – Western charities fund important health, education and advocacy projects, and can mobilise quickly when disaster hits. But the money will be used much more effectively if received directly by local community-based organisations. The problem is that these organisations work so locally, that those of us outside of the communities don't know about them.
The other thing I now realise is that social justice is more important than charity. Empowering communities to demand justice and political representation will do much more to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality in the long-term.
Bringing these reflections back to a more personal level, the way I think about my own money situation has completely changed since I started working in the sector.
As I wrote in an earlier post about the evolution of my financial blueprint, I used to associate money with guilt. In that first job working with refugees, though I earned a small salary, it was four times as much as my local colleagues, and that didn't sit well with me. But I eventually made peace with the fact that I was getting paid more than local staff, because my life circumstances are different.
I am incredibly privileged compared to them. My British passport gives me access to most countries in the world, whereas some of my undocumented friends cannot even leave the local town. I have an education, whereas their certifications aren't even recognised.
But they also have things I do not, such as a close community to rely on, and perhaps family-owned land should they choose to go back to their villages. Meanwhile, if I want to go back and re-settle in my home-town, I will need to pay upwards of £600 in rent, not to mention higher food and transportation costs. Earning a small salary was fine in the short-term, but was not a sustainable life choice.
While I take a breather from social justice work (at a professional level), I look forward to exploring further how it correlates with my newer passion for financial independence.
Have any remarks or dissenting opinions on the above? I'd love to read your comments below.
Thanks for sharing Mindy – I loved hearing your experiences in international development – it's such a nuanced and complex field and you've captured it beautifully.
Thanks Ms ZiYou! It is a fascinating sector, and one that I often feel conflicted about. The development paradigm follows mainstream economic thinking – which often causes more harm than good at grassroots level. Thankfully some of the bigger NGOs are becoming more critical of the status quo.
Thanks Mindy – very interesting and educational. I too must stop thinking of those people as poor!
Thanks Weenie, glad it helps to give a different perspective!
Interesting. Western organizations have a tough time making a lasting impact, from what I've heard. I think sending money directly to the local organization sounds like a good idea. The local people know their own challenges best.
Thanks Joe! Very true – there are lots of inefficiencies with western NGOs, although some are much better at working with local partners than others.


text:
Interested in attending?
Please RSVP to clergyassistant@comsynrye.org.
Have questions? Please email Jacey Taub. Every other month, CSR's Book Club facilitates interesting discussions over wine, cheese, and other creative snacks as we explore the layers of a novel while connecting them to relevant and relatable Jewish texts.
Everyone is welcome!
Past books include:
"Becoming Eve" by Abby Stein
"American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins
"Where the Forest Meets the Stars" by Glendy Vanderah
"Read at the Bone: A Novel" by Jacqueline Woodson
"The Tattooist of Auschwitz" by Heather Morris
"Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens
"The Subway Girls" by Susie Orman Schnall
"Between You and Me" by Susan Wiggs
"An American Marriage" by Tayari Jones
"Eternal Life: A Novel" by Dara Horn
"Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward
"Waking Lions" by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Every other month, CSR's Book Club facilitates interesting discussions over wine, cheese, and other creative snacks as we explore the layers of a novel while connecting them to relevant and relatable Jewish texts.
Wednesday, July 15, 2020 at 7:30 pm - Location TBD
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick!
"Bennett's tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it's especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye." —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal
"This is sure to be one of 2020's best and boldest . . . Bennett's next masterpiece is a triumph of character-driven narrative." --Elle
From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.


While oil and gas supplies have yet to be significantly affected by the current spat surrounding Qatar, it could escalate tensions in the region, home to a majority of the world's oil reserves, and lead to deeper geopolitical instability.
While crude and products will see only modest changes from the expansion of the Panama Canal, the effects for LNG and propane will be much greater. The U.S. LNG industry will now have access to a transit route that can accommodate larger tankers at a time the industry is primed to export volumes to Asia.
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz stated that energy security is a "collective responsibility," noting, for example, that insecurity elsewhere negatively affects the U.S.


Additional pages: earnings-disclaimer, leadcapture, privacy-policy, saleletter, thankyou.
Self Hypnosis Could Be The Answer To Your Problems… Or A Huge Nightmare If Done Incorrectly!
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Oooh, shiny thing!
January 27, 2009 By Pete Warden in Uncategorized 1 Comment
While they have plenty of limitations, tag clouds are excellent for outlining the relative importance of many concepts at once. They're also visually very attractive, a lot more eye-catching than a uniform paragraph of text or a bullet-point list.
I'm having trouble coming up with any arguments on what a 3D tag cloud is actually good for (if pushed I'd mumble something about using the extra dimension to show time information) but boy, is it it pretty! Awesome job by Roy Tanck, and thanks to Logic Nest for finding it.
Step 1- Network Analysis, Step 2- Profit
January 26, 2009 By Pete Warden in Uncategorized Leave a comment
My friend Mrinal just pointed me towards someone I should have found long ago. Rob Cross is a management professor at the University of Virginia who's applied social network analysis to improve all sorts of companies. The part I like the most is that his case studies are strongly focused on concrete results and money saved. Here's some of the things that he's used network analysis for:
– Cloning a successful team by duplicating its structure with another set of people
– Fostering innovation by identifying brokers who spread improvements across the organization
– Spreading best practices by integrating groups within the company working on similar problems
– Building connections between sales teams so they can boost revenue by cross-selling
I've ordered his two books, Driving Results Through Social Networks and Hidden Power of Social Networks:
If you're looking for a layman's guide to what he's able to do for companies, his newspaper articles are a good place to start.
All of his analysis, in common with other practitioners like Ronald Burt, is based on self-reporting and surveys. I'm pretty convinced that many of these same techniques will be even more interesting and detailed if you apply them to implicitly generated communications data. Your email inbox is going to be a more accurate and comprehensive record of who you communicate than your recollection.
A better source of Enron's emails in PSTs
Photo by Irish Typepad
Dr John Wang [Update- sorry, wrong John Wang!] has just started a new site called EnronData.org, dedicated to developing and refining the Enron email dataset. It's off to a cracking start, offering all the Enron emails as 148 PST files, one for each 'custodian' (informally each mail user). I did my own PST conversion, but it was primarily so I had a large data set to load onto an Exchange server and test Mailana against. John's version is much closer to the original source data, and so will be more of a real-world test for applications.
I'm really pleased John has put this together, it will be a boon to anyone looking at doing heavy-duty email data-mining. I can't wait to see what else the project produces.
Who are the email innovators?
Photo by Cayusa
Deva Hazarika
Founder of ClearContext, Deva's been pushing the boundaries of email productivity for years with his Outlook plugin. There's too many clever ideas in there to list, and who can argue with a guy who got his seed-funding playing online poker?
T.A. McCann
T.A.'s behind Gist. Along with Steve Newman, they're building a startup focused on linking external information to email contacts, breaking down the silo that surrounds email, a cause dear to my own heart. I'm jealous of the name too, very appropriate and memorable.
Gabor Cselle
Former Engineering VP of Xobni, Gabor's now beavering away on a new email startup. Not many details have emerged yet, but I know it will be worth watching.
Sherman Dickman
Co-founder of Postbox with Scott MacGregor, Sherman's building an entirely new email client, with a radically new interface for working with all the information we've accumulated in our inboxes. The dominant UI we have at the moment for mail messages is essentially a DOS directory listing, Postbox (and Xoopit with some similar ideas) gives you a truly graphical user interface for mail.
Joshua Baer
Joshua is the founder of OtherInbox, another company trying to move email away from being a flat list. Rather than reimagining the core interface, they're using multiple email addresses and automated-email recognition to present all the information that Facebook and other services send via email in a much simpler form. And by removing that bacn from your messages, they return email to its roots as a person-to-person medium, one of the big reasons that Facebook mail is so pleasant to use.
Roger Matus
CEO of Inboxer, Roger's one of the few people I know innovating in email on the server side. Since administrators make the purchase decisions there, not end users, a lot of the product is driven by regulatory and security concerns, but they also manage to offer some interesting options for searching and recovering attachments.
Who am I missing? Let me know…
Runners are crazy
Photo by Giorgio Zanetti
My friend Howard Cohen, one of the few people to complete the 70 mile Backbone Trail in a day, is off to North Africa next month to take part in the Libyan Challenge. Running 120 miles across the desert, unsupported, he's part of the first American team ever to enter the race.
I like to think I'm fairly fit, but Howard and the other ultra-runners are in a class of their own. It's awe-inducing to see how far they can stretch a human body, and the mental toughness they need to get through their ordeals is amazing. It takes some inspired insanity to tackle challenges like these.
Stop by Howard's site and wish him the best, and keep an eye on the offical website if you want to follow their progress starting February 24th.
Is Boulder a community or a clique?
The comments on Micah's post about the Boulder tech scene got me thinking about the difference between a community and a clique. On one level, a clique is any community you're not in. All social groups offer advantages to their members and have barriers to entry, which can make them infuriating to outsiders.
Communities work because they distribute the cost of evaluating strangers across all the members, and magnify the cost of offending any member by spreading information about transgressions. In other words, social networks generate reputations. Reputations aren't perfect, but they're harder to fake than any other signal we've got about trustworthiness.
So, we need groups, but we all know from high school how they can be used for evil. What distinguishes a good community from a clique?
– Meritocratic. Inclusion and status should be determined by something more or less objective.
– Open. There should be established, well-known ways to become part of the group.
– Positive. The community should be defined by who they include, not who's excluded.
In my experience, Boulder's tech scene is all of these. Sure, there's well-connected people, and others who are less in the loop, but the central people tend to be there because they're heavily involved in events, or have a long track record in startups. There's a lot of events and programs like TechStars, boulder.me, new tech meetups, hackspace and Ignite Boulder that are good entrypoints to the community.
A shocking expose of the venture funding process!
If you want to understand how VCs really decide which startups to fund, or how entrepreneurs arrive at their sales forecasts, watch this stunning series from the San Diego Venture Group. If nothing else, you'll learn the best way to approach VCs (hint- it involves assembling a massive spreadsheet of hundreds of email addresses and sending nightly emails to them all until they agree to give you money).
Thanks to Startup Lawyer and Brandon Zeuner for alerting me to this fine example of investigative journalism.
How to view the MAPI/RPC documentation online
Photo by Law Keven
Microsoft recently released the documentation for the secret protocol Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Yeay! Unfortunately they released it as a large number of PDFs in a zip file. Boo!
I've been using them for my work on Mailana, but having to use local file searching or manual browsing through all these documents rather than my usual web search has slowed me down. Today I finally bit the bullet, ran them through a PDF batch converter to get HTML, and put them online at http://web.mailana.com/exchangedocs
In a few days all that lovely information should show up in Google searches, and the site search should work too. Thanks to Darren Hoyt for the simple site-search HTML and PDF Bean for the conversion tools.
It's a shame that Microsoft's own documentation is so unfriendly to the web. They often change links without implementing forwarding, so often old blog or forum posts lead nowhere, and some documentation like this is only available as unsearchable downloads. Of course Apple can be worse, requiring logins before you can get at a lot of the resources, and the mailing list search tools are worthy of a geocities page ten years ago. It's funny how lost I feel when I'm researching an area that's invisible to Google, it really has become half of my brain.
What makes a great salesman?
Photo by The Life of Bryan
One of the things I really suck at is selling. Part of it is growing up in Britain with the belief it's about tricking people into buying things they don't need. Being a professional engineer didn't help either. Most programmers are simply baffled that customers don't simply get that their product is better. Why do they need some highly-paid guy in a suit to get involved?
As I got older, I realized that every job is a sales job. To get anything done, you need to persuade a whole bunch of internal and external people to help. Now I'm running a startup, and that's all about selling the idea to everyone I need to deal with; investors, business partners, employees and customers.
I've looked around for role models. My favorite so far is an infomercial host called Ron Popeil. I can imagine my British friends cringing because he's almost a caricature, but this profile by Malcolm Gladwell opened my mind to both how much dedication he has, and how effective he's been. So, what are his secrets?
Feedback and measurement
He's from a family with a long tradition of selling on street corners. At the end of an afternoon, they'd know exactly how much they'd brought in. That gave them a guide they could use to figure out what worked and what didn't. The infomercials followed the same principles, with real-time graphs showing how many people were calling and ordering.
This might sound obvious, but as Dim Bulb repeatedly demonstrates, most TV advertising is driven by the intangible idea of brand, with no idea what's actually working or failing. It's like the difference between the Greek philosophers building elaborate theories on how the universe works, and experimental science that's able to test ideas.
I've become a fanatic on trying to measure everything I can about my communications, keeping track of who I've talked to and when, measuring which pages and posts get visitors, using online ad experiments to gather survey data. Without that foundation, I'll never be able to improve.
Involvement in design
Ron actually built and designed his products in his kitchen. The goal was to create something that would sell itself. Too often, there's a distance between sales teams and the people who build the products. They might have some voice in the planning stages, but they're shut out during the implementation and expected to take whatever the result is and sell it.
Since I keep swapping hats between selling and building, you'd think I wouldn't have this problem. It's funny though, I often get caught up in the geeky coolness of the technology, and lose sight of what people are willing to pay for. The lesson I took from Ron's example here was to keep asking myself what problem every feature I'm working on is actually solving.
In the infomercials, the camera quickly focuses on the gadget, and stays there. It's not about the personality of the salesman, it's all about what the device can do. There's an anecdote in Gladwell's story about a showdown between a few salesmen at a trade show. Frosty Wilson was charming and persuasive, everything you'd imagine a great salesman should be, but Ron and his partner both sold twice as much by making the product the star.
In my job, I've learnt it's best to cut to the demo as quickly as possible, and then let people try the prototype themselves. Nobody wants to sit and listen to a lecture, it's much more compelling to see what it can do rather than be told.
Fervent belief
Ron really, truly believed that the products he was selling would make his customers lives better. He sounds like Steve Jobs when he's hammering away at the smallest details of every design, making sure that everyone gets an experience they'll be delighted with. It's not just about getting their money, it's his purpose.
Luckily I am insanely convinced that what I'm building will change the way we work. I've found I'm most effective when I can just informally rant about all the amazing possibilities rather than sticking to a script.
Your real social network
Stowe Boyd covered an interesting paper on social networks and concluded "the apparent, superficial social network based on following and followers conceals a deeper, sparser social network". Every current service has an incredibly primitive representation of your relationships. You're either friends with somebody, or you're not. Here's what''s missing:
– Strength. There's no way to specify how close you are to somebody else.
– Time. Is the friendship long-lasting? Have you talked recently?
– Context. What other friends is this friend close to? Which circles do they move in?
It's well known that you can use communication data to answer these questions. This implicit approach is better than trying to get people to enter this information manually because:
– Convenience. Nobody wants to spend time doing data entry and house-keeping on their network. Doing it automatically solves that problem.
– Reliability. You can objectively measure how many emails somebody has sent you, and how many you've returned to them. This removes the subjective element that creeps in if you're asked to rate the strength of a relationship on an arbitrary scale. It also removes the temptation to exaggerate your closeness to someone influential.
So why hasn't anyone done this? There's massive technical barriers to overcome before you can access large stores of email, and big privacy issues. I'm convinced they can be overcome, and that's what I'm doing with Mailana. If you want to see the sort of detailed social graph I'm talking about, Boulder Twits is using the same backend as my email analysis system.